Though ambition in itself is a vice, it often is also the parent of virtue.
~By Hosea Ballou ~
Behold, I am become a reproach to thy holy name, by serving any ambition and the sins of others; which though I did by the persuasion of other men, yet my own conscience did cheek and upbraid me in it.
~By William Laud ~
The press regularly proclaims my ambitions and my financial demands.
~By Placido Domingo ~
My mother wanted me off her hands. She was a working woman. She designed clothes, and she was a celebrity collector. It's my mother's ambition to be a celebrity.
~By Stephen Sondheim ~
It's stasis that kills you off in the end, not ambition.
~By Bono ~
It took a deadly illness to put me eye to eye with that truth, but it is a truth that the country, caught up in its ruthless ambitions and moral decay, can learn on my dime.
~By Lee Atwater ~
Most minds think from A to B to G to O, or hold goals and ambitions to keep them going.
~By Lynette Fromme ~
Ambition is a lust that is never quenched, but grows more inflamed and madder by enjoyment.
~By Thomas Otway ~
The architecture profession has lost a lot of its integrity, especially in the USA. The general architect here has no scruples, no ambitions.
~By Helmut Jahn ~
Do not let your grand ambitions stand in the way of small but meaningful accomplishments.
~By Bryant H. McGill ~
If you tell people your ambitions, they usually laugh at you. When I told my girlfriends when I was 12 that I was going to Hollywood, they all laughed. And here I am!
~By Helen Reddy ~
As the country now turns a new leaf, our ambition is to give hope to each and every Afghan.
~By Hamid Karzai ~
As a youngster, I enjoyed sport and my ambition was to be a great sportsman.
~By Lynn Davies ~
I have a few personal ambitions for the band.
~By John Deacon ~
Wisdom alone is true ambition's aim, wisdom is the source of virtue and of fame; obtained with labour, for mankind employed, and then, when most you share it, best enjoyed.
~By Alfred North Whitehead ~
So they've actually - it's not that her character is a singer, but she had ambition to do that at an earlier time in her life. So I've actually sung two or three times now on the show.
~By Katey Sagal ~
I instantly chucked my academic ambitions and began writing fiction full-time.
~By Peter Straub ~
Since we started, Chris and I had theatrical ambitions.
~By Neil Tennant ~
I had this dream, and I really wanted to be a star. And I was almost a monster in the way that I was really fearless with my ambitions.
~By Lady Gaga ~
I had a burning ambition. Otherwise, I wouldn't have accomplished it.
~By Claire Bloom ~
Ambition is not what a man would do, but what a man does, for ambition without action is fantasy.
~By Bryant H. McGill ~
Great ambition, the desire of real superiority, of leading and directing, seems to be altogether peculiar to man, and speech is the great instrument of ambition.
~By Adam Smith ~
Moderation is the feebleness and sloth of the soul, whereas ambition is the warmth and activity of it.
~By Francois de La Rochefoucauld ~
You know, I think when I reflect on it, I think there's certainly a sense of history. When you have ambitions to play this game, you want to be one of the best ever, and you want to play so well and be so effective that you want people to remember your name 100 years from now.
~By Marcus Allen ~
I had all the usual ambition growing up. I wanted to be a writer, a musician, a hockey player. I wanted to do something that wasn't nine to five. Acting was the first thing I tried that clicked.
~By Michael J. Fox ~
I'm just a ballplayer with one ambition, and that is to give all I've got to help my ball club win. I've never played any other way.
~By Joe DiMaggio ~
My ambitions were already very clearly fixed by the time I was 6 or 7.
~By Joshua Lederberg ~
Basically you have to suppress your own ambitions in order to be who you need to be.
~By Bob Dylan ~
In college, I got interested in news because the world was coming apart. The civil rights movement, the antiwar movement, the women's right movement. That focused my radio ambitions toward news.
~By Bob Edwards ~
The United States must also continue to push the United Nations Security Council for strong action to thwart Iran's nuclear ambitions. In the meantime, it is our job to take meaningful steps to eliminate the threats posed by Iran.
~By Allyson Schwartz ~
My one ambition is to play a hero.
~By Sessue Hayakawa ~
At the age of six I wanted to be a cook. At seven I wanted to be Napoleon. And my ambition has been growing steadily ever since.
~By Salvador Dali ~
Let love flow so that it cleanses the world. Then man can live in peace, instead of the state of turmoil he has created through his past ways of life, with all those material interests and earthly ambitions.
~By Sai Baba ~
Human nature must have come much nearer perfection than it is now, or will be in many generations, to exclude from such a control prejudice, selfishness, ambition, and injustice.
~By Elihu Root ~
Though ambition in itself is a vice, yet it is often the parent of virtues.
~By Marcus Fabius Quintilian ~
Never let inexperience get in the way of ambition.
~By Terry Josephson ~
It is my fervent wish and my greatest ambition to leave a work with a few useful instructions for the pianists after me.
~By Franz Liszt ~
An once of hypocrisy is worth a pound of ambition.
~By Michael Korda ~
My ambition when I started out was to play two or three gigs a week. And that's what I'm doing.
~By Van Morrison ~
When ambition ends, happiness begins.
~By Thomas Merton ~
In a couple, sometimes, one or both people have to give up their personal life, dreams and ambitions for the good of the family.
~By Monica Bellucci ~
My ambition is to do a good job. I never plan anything.
~By Ilie Nastase ~
In the future, when we get serious about executing things correctly, this thing will be very easy to do. If we find out that this technique does not work, I don't intend to step on dead bodies to achieve something because I don't have that kind of ambition. My ambition is to help people.
~By Panayiotis Zavos ~
Some slaves are scoured to their work by whips, others by their restlessness and ambition.
~By John Ruskin ~
Ambition is not what man does... but what man would do.
~By Robert Browning ~
The big biography of Lincoln necessarily had to do so much with his political career, his ambitions, his accomplishments in public, with less time to spend on his private life, his inner life, and I thought this might be a way of getting at that.
~By David Herbert Donald ~
Individual ambition is undoubtedly a strong motive in student work, but there is such a thing among students everywhere as ambition for others, call it class spirit, esprit de corps, good fellowship, or good will to men.
~By Herbert Baxter Adams ~
His ambition is to be the spider in the World Wide Web.
~By John McCarthy ~
The failure of women to produce genius of the first rank in most of the supreme forms of human effort has been used to block the way of all women of talent and ambition for intellectual achievement.
~By Anna Garlin Spencer ~
Ambition should be made of sterner stuff.
~By William Shakespeare ~
One thing all stage mothers share is an overpowering ambition for their daughters.
~By Lawrence Welk ~
Being non-commercial is never an ambition. Movies come together at different points for fortuitous reasons. You do them as you get the opportunity, as opposed to doing them when you choose to or design to.
~By Ethan Coen ~
Somebody ought to tell him his ambition is showing.
~By Harry Essex ~
Focusing your life solely on making a buck shows a certain poverty of ambition. It asks too little of yourself. Because it's only when you hitch your wagon to something larger than yourself that you realize your true potential.
~By Barack Obama ~
Failure is only postponed success as long as courage 'coaches' ambition. The habit of persistence is the habit of victory.
~By Herbert Kaufman ~
At the beginning of the 20th century, the ambition of the great painters was to make paintings that were like music, which was then considered as the noblest art.
~By Brian Eno ~
God like Us suffers the ambition to make a destiny more extraordinary than was conceived for Him, yes God is like Me, only more so.
~By Norman Mailer ~
I've become a captive of my own ambitions.
~By Patsy Cline ~
I have been absolutely hag-ridden with ambition. If I could wish to have anything in the world it would be to be free of ambition.
~By Tallulah Bankhead ~
We're not all nice, and there are a lot of levels of ambition and niceness.
~By Heather Donahue ~
Ambition drove many men to become false; to have one thought locked in the breast, another ready on the tongue.
~By Sallust ~
The common faults of American language are an ambition of effect, a want of simplicity, and a turgid abuse of terms.
~By James F. Cooper ~
Where ambition can cover its enterprises, even to the person himself, under the appearance of principle, it is the most incurable and inflexible of passions.
~By Angela Carter ~
Lincoln's stature and strength, his intelligence and ambition - in short, all the elements which gave him popularity among men in New Salem, rendered him equally attractive to the fair sex of that village.
~By John George Nicolay ~
Me only have one ambition, y'know. I only have one thing I really like to see happen. I like to see mankind live together - black, white, Chinese, everyone - that's all.
~By Bob Marley ~
What is my loftiest ambition? I've always wanted to throw an egg at an electric fan.
~By Oliver Herford ~
Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, ambition inspired, and success achieved.
~By Helen Keller ~
Ambition, if it feeds at all, does so on the ambition of others.
~By Susan Sontag ~
Ambition leads me not only farther than any other man has been before me, but as far as I think it possible for man to go.
~By James Cook ~
I should have been smart enough to stay happy. But my ambition ruled my life.
~By Eva Gabor ~
My biggest ambition is never to be bored. I'm not aggressive enough to strongly run after being an actress.
~By Anjelica Huston ~
I think when people talk about ambition and talking to him, it might have seemed that he wasn't ambitious.
~By Alan Hansen ~
Do not let your ambitions become a sanctuary for your failures.
~By Bryant H. McGill ~
Ambition never comes to an end.
~By Kenneth Kaunda ~
It's okay to have personal ambitions, but you have to take someone with you.
~By Roger Staubach ~
The U.S. along with China, Japan, South Korea and Russia has an important role to play in containing North Korea's nuclear ambitions and exerting all the influence we can possibly exert.
~By Zach Wamp ~
Men often pass from love to ambition, but they seldom come back again from ambition to love.
~By Francois de La Rochefoucauld ~
My ambition is to have beautiful encounters, not to make money.
~By Juliette Binoche ~
A noble man compares and estimates himself by an idea which is higher than himself; and a mean man, by one lower than himself. The one produces aspiration; the other ambition, which is the way in which a vulgar man aspires.
~By Marcus Aurelius ~
My one ambition was to go to Broadway, and I never gave up on that dream.
~By David Hasselhoff ~
The left and the right live in parallel universes. The right listens to talk radio, the left's on the Internet and they just reinforce one another. They have no sense of reality. I have now one ambition: to retire before it becomes essential to tweet.
~By Barney Frank ~
I used to think I had ambition... but now I'm not so sure. It may have been only discontent. They're easily confused.
~By Rachel Field ~
It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what others say in a whole book.
~By Friedrich Nietzsche ~
To be happy at home is the ultimate result of all ambition, the end to which every enterprise and labor tends, and of which every desire prompts the prosecution.
~By Samuel Johnson ~
My ambition is peace and perfection.
~By DeForest Kelley ~
I didn't know then that I would never be able to leave the sounds and smells of these sights behind me, but I was fiercely conscious of one thing-my ambition.
~By Emanuel Celler ~
Nothing else so destroys the power to stand alone as the habit of leaning upon others. If you lean, you will never be strong or original. Stand alone or bury your ambition to be somebody in the world.
~By Orison Swett Marden ~
All I wanted to do was write - at the time, poems, and prose, too. I guess my ambition was simply to make money however I could to keep myself going in some modest way, and I didn't need much, I was unmarried at the time, no children.
~By Paul Auster ~
The greatest evil which fortune can inflict on men is to endow them with small talents and great ambition.
~By Marquis De Vauvenargues ~
If you have ambition, you might not achieve anything, but without ambition, you are almost certain not to achieve anything.
~By Whitfield Diffie ~
My secret ambition was always to provide music for animation films: something with an Indian theme, either a fairy tale or mythological tale or on the Krishna theme. I still have a very deep desire, but these sorts of chances don't always come.
~By Ravi Shankar ~
I really never had any ambitions to be a standup comic. I was talked into it by guys that I used to work out with.
~By Joe Rogan ~
Ambition is a Dead Sea fruit, and the greatest peril to the soul is that one is likely to get precisely what he is seeking.
~By Edward Dahlberg ~
Oh that I were seated as high as my ambition, I'd place my naked foot on the necks of monarchs.
~By Horace Walpole ~
According to its doctors, my one intransigent desire is to have been a Confederate general, and because I could not or would not become anything else, I set up for poet and beg an to invent fictions about the personal ambitions that my society has no use for.
~By Allen Tate ~
A youthful mind is seldom totally free from ambition; to curb that, is the first step to contentment, since to diminish expectation is to increase enjoyment.
~By Frances Burney ~
There has to be this pioneer, the individual who has the courage, the ambition to overcome the obstacles that always develop when one tries to do something worthwhile, especially when it is new and different.
~By Alfred P. Sloan ~
I had ambition not only to go farther than any man had ever been before, but as far as it was possible for a man to go.
~By Joseph Conrad ~
The movies that are made more thoughtfully or made or with more ambition often get just get drowned out by the noise.
~By Roger Ebert ~
Ambition is but avarice on stilts, and masked.
~By Walter Savage Landor ~
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